O'Brien on Leadership

This site is a forum for discussion on leadership and leaders in many different communities: business, politics, the military and others. My goal is promote meaningful discussion on the qualities of leadership and promote the development of better leaders. I also maintain a blog ( http://commonsense4unitedstates.blogspot.com/ ) wherein I discuss political and other issues of the day.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Learning from the VA Mess

As I am sure everyone
knows, Eric Shinseki resigned his position as Secretary of the Veteran’s
Administration. That is appropriate if only because that is how Washington
should work. As I was told many years ago, once ‘you’ become the lead part of
the story, you need to go. This of course pertains mainly to senior appointees,
but the point is simple: Shinseki isn’t supposed to be in that job for his own
good; he is there – as is every appointee in every administration – to further
the platform of the president who appointed him. So, once you are more news
then the organization or the platform the odds are you are taking away from the
platform. Thus, time to go.

All that being said, what
can we learn from what has happened and what is happening with the VA?

I had an opportunity to
talk with a very experienced Washington lawyer this past week about much of
this. I made the statement that we don’t even know what is going on at the VA,
in a fundamental sense: we don’t have a comprehensive inspection system, and
the VA – like all the other departments in the government – has never been
independently audited. (The VA, like every other department and agency in the
Executive Branch has an Inspector General and a Comptroller – but they do not
attempt top to bottom audits, the federal government uses its own accounting
system [one that is so far removed from the accounting procedures used by
private and commercial sectors that use of it would land you in the hoosegow]
and there is no formal process of inspection, reporting and grading in most of
the departments, the uniformed services being an exception in that specific
regard.)

As my friend said, right
now you probably couldn’t complete an audit – a true audit – of the VA. They
have operated within the rules of the federal fantasy world that – like DOD –
no one really thinks a true audit is possible. (In the mid 1990sDOD was ordered
by Congress to switch something approaching ‘common accounting practices’ but
has failed to do so. In 2010 Congress ordered DOD to be ready for a ‘full
audit’ by 2016; just several weeks ago the comptroller for DOD told Congress
that the DOD was not going to be able to meet that deadline – 7 years isn’t
enough to prepare for an audit.)

So, the first lesson we
need to learn is this: you can’t know what is right and wrong if you can’t know
anything. Said differently, you need to keep orderly books. That sounds pretty
mundane, and pretty obvious. And while it is for corporate America, there are
many small businesses, and even more charities, non-profits, and state and
local government agencies that simply don’t have squared away books. And if you
can’t put your finger on your assets and liabilities – all of them – then you
have no starting point. So, get your books straight.

The second point is this,
and this pertains to any organization of more than two people, you need to have
standards and you need to inspect to those standards. In the early days of any
organization everyone knows ‘where you are going,’ and everyone is working just
as hard as they can. But that knowledge and passion can fade quickly.With it will also fade your excellence.
So you need standards. And you need to have some sort of inspection and grading
process. Recommendation: set really high standards, ones that look impossible
to meet. And establish a yearly (at a minimum) inspection regime for your major
elements – whatever they are.

Now, this doesn’t need to
be onerous, dramatically formal, or terrifying; it doesn’t need to be a form of
punishment. But there does need to be some process to ensure high standards are
set and met. Inspections can be used to identify problem areas where you need
to commit more training assets or any other type of assets, to include
leadership attention. In fact, done properly, inspections can become a key tool
for constant improvement of the organization and the people in it.

Third, your organization
– the formal organization – will very rapidly grow into its own ‘persona,’ and
as such, it will consume energy to protect itself, not help your mission.

As a result, performance
can be misleading; you need to regularly dig into the actual workings and
understand what is going on. For example, there was certainly some good,
and in some cases ex exceptional medical treatment in Russian hospitals at the
peak of the Soviet Union; but that's not because the system worked, it's
because there is a common thread of decency in most people and the bulk of the
people who end up as doctors and nurses - anywhere, any time - want to help.
So, they do. The question that needed to be asked then (assuming the leadership
in the USSR cared – which they didn’t) and which needs to be asked and answered
now with regard to the VA is whether the system is helping, neutral or hurting
the practice of doctors and nurses helping patients.

As an old friend used to say (3 decades ago),
whenever you debrief any operation, and your decisions in that operation, you
need to know what decisions worked and why, which ones didn't work and why not,
and which ones were irrelevant and why.

How many times have you heard (said for that matter)
something to the effect 'well, the director (CEO, President, etc.) was all
hosed up and the directions were a mess, but we figured out a way around the
road block and made it work.' (That is nearly the motto of some organizations.)
Every time someone says that they are saying the system - the organization -
isn't part of the solution. At best it is not helping and not hurting. But, in
all likelihood, it is hurting.

You need to take the time to understand precisely how
your organization is helping – or hindering – your people in the performance of
their tasks. And you also need to understand if and when you are having no
impact on the organization, when your ‘decisions’ have no meaningful impact on
operations.But, if your people
are constantly commenting on ‘finding a solution’ outside the system, you have
a serious problem.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Lessons Learned

When people talk about
leadership they love to talk about vision, and mission statements and
‘motivating the troops,’ and all the other pieces that can make being a leader
– at any level – both challenging and exciting. But there is another piece to
leadership, and it is as necessary a part of leadership as are the fundamentals
of vision, intellect, communication and the rest. That piece is the process of
learning from mistakes.

In the military,
particularly in certain high performance communities such as fighter aviation
and Special Forces, there is a process that is known colloquially as ‘the
debrief.’ In fact, there are a broad range of ‘debriefs,’ from the intense, 20
minute long, pointed tactical debriefs that take place immediately after every
flight or every special warfare ‘problem’ – whether operational(real) or exercise, all the way up
through theater-wide collection of ‘lessons learned’ that take weeks or months
to assemble and are analyzed by the various war colleges and such offices as
the ‘Center for Naval Analysis.’

All of these
various efforts have as their goal improving the performance of all those
involved and all those that will follow. Properly done, this process will
improve both the planning and execution of any effort, unit level training, and
the equipment used, and most importantly, will improve the decision-making
ability of those involved.

There are three
major cognitive categories of every de-brief or lesson learned:

- What worked
and Why?

- What didn’t
work and Why not?

- What worked
in spite of your actions?

There are more
possible ways to parse this, but when done properly, these three major
subdivisions will in fact encapsulate all the other possible categories.

This is nothing
more than an effort to learn from experience, so that all benefit from the
mistakes of others. To do it well requires several characteristics, including
the ability to accurately collect information on what has taken place, the
ability to accurately relate and analyze that information, and the ability to
coldly and clinically analyze and evaluate the results.This last item, the ability to
understand what happened and reach an accurate conclusion, is the most
important part of the entire process. Without it the process is meaningless.
And without it, it is impossible to become a top decision-maker.

Good
‘debriefers’ become such because they practice the art for years, continually
honing what can only be described as an art. To watch a top fighter pilot or
SEAL debrief an operation is to understand the full scope of a real
professional. It requires dedication to excellence, discipline and a critical
eye; and years of practice.

Of course, one
of the real problems with Lessons Learned is that if you keep at it long enough
you will eventually arrive at a problem in which the next step is ‘start over
with a completely different concept.’

This is perhaps
the hardest decision that any organization can face – though to give the ‘devil
his due,’ DOD has made this decision from time to time. Examples mainly can be
found in procurement decisions in which certain classes of weapon systems have
been terminated. For example, in the 1960s DOD and the Air Force ended the B-70
high altitude, supersonic bomber when it became clear that the technology trend
for future weapons made the survivability of such an aircraft unlikely.
Businesses have the advantage that they can attach profit and loss figures to
many concepts, making the decision to stop easier in some – but certainly not
all – cases.

But, in the
end, the key is that the experiences of the past need to be continually
analyzed and assessed and good leaders will evaluate those assessments and
decide when it is time to say ‘enough.’

It is worth
noting that this is what is not happening in the federal government; we have
several echelons of leadership that are seemingly incapable of recognizing that
they are incapable of controlling what is happening in the ever expanding and
increasingly complex departments and agencies. Large businesses have the
advantage of clearly understood returns on investment/profit and loss
statements to ‘keep them honest’ – hard data points that allow them to ‘fall
back’ onto more or less objective material; governments do not. Healthcare can
be measured either at the very personnel level – between you and your doctor,
or it can be measured in profit and loss statements among the various
businesses that make up the health care industry. But the efforts to control
large and sprawling operations such as government health care are showing an organization
that has already unraveled. But the leadership refuses to see that the only
reasonable step at this point is to reduce the size of the effort and their own
span of control.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

CHARGE!!!

Several weeks ago
(On December 3rd) a man died who had a great deal to tell us about
real leadership.The and was Edwin
Shuman III, a retired Navy Captain, an A-6 pilot, father of four - two sons and
a daughter and one stepson, grandfather of nine, great-grandfather of one,
brother to five - three sisters and two other brothers, an instructor at the
Naval Academy.And a
Prisoner-Of-War in Hanoi from March of 1968 to March of 1973.

He was noted among
the other ‘inmates’ as the guy who, in December 1970, organized the first
church service in the prison.For
this act he and four others were severely beaten.But they did have a church service, and many more in the
years that followed.

There are a great
many things to say about Captain Ed Shuman – all of them good; he was an
exemplary man in every way.He was
also an excellent leader and there is an important lesson in leadership to be
learned from his actions.

It is important to
understand that Shuman was not the senior man in the prison – not by a long shot.But he happened to be the senior man in
the crowded room that held 42 prisoners. And so he took charge; he acted as he
believed was right.

Very few will ever
face the kind of situation faced by Captain Shuman and the other POWs.But there are a host of valuable
lessons to glean from his actions, the simplest and most obvious is this: when
you believe something needs to be done – take charge.It doesn’t really matter whether it a great issue or a minor
one; if you think something really should be done – then take charge, get ‘it’
started, whatever ‘it’ might be.

This is not
necessarily an easy thing to do.There is a natural reticence in most people to act, to lead, when they
are clearly not ‘in charge.’And
there certainly are certain times when it is clearly inappropriate to act and
passivity is the preferred course of action.

But our real fear
in acting overwhelmingly involves two possibilities: 1) that we will ‘go off’
in the wrong direction, or 2) that even though we are going in the right direction,
we will be chastised for ‘leading the charge.’

And neither really
is that important.A story a
friend of mine used to use perfectly illustrates the point: the rhinoceros and
the turtle:

There were two
animals on the svelte in central Africa, a rhinoceros and a turtle, and they
were friends.The rhinoceros was
always going off, charging at things and running off in a great hurry, breaking
things and getting everyone angry at him.His friend the turtle moved slowly and deliberately, with no miss-steps
and no grave errors, and everyone liked him.The other animals noted all this and one by one they asked
the wise old owl what they could learn from it.The owl answered:

“It is simple,”
replied the owl, “the turtle never gets anywhere or accomplishes anything of
note.No matter what direction he
heads, it doesn’t matter. The rhinoceros on the other hand is loud and brash
and he breaks things. His eyesight isn’t very good and he sometimes even breaks
things he wants to keep.But he
makes things happen.Even when he
goes off in the wrong direction others see him doing so and tell him and he
turns and heads in a new direction.And when he is finally pointed in the right direction he charges through
any barrier.The rhinoceros gets
things done.Be a rhinoceros.”

Every
organization, of any size, engaged in any and every kind of activity, needs
rhinoceroses if it wants to succeed.As a boss, you need to foster an atmosphere that allows people to “take
over” and “lead a charge.”As one
of the folks in the middle, you need to be ready to lead a charge, to stand up
and take command.To be a
rhinoceros.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Branches and Sequels

Planning is a
strange thing: everyone does it to some extent, some people are more diligent
and formal about it; but very few people do it well.

There are some
simple reasons for this, but the two key reasons are this: a well constructed
and complete plan is usually a good deal of hard work, and such a plan requires
hard choices and that means good leadership.But the thing of it is, a well-constructed plan is actually
worth a great deal more than simply the plan itself.

This is because
of a couple of things that are intrinsic elements of the process of making a
good plan.

1) The boss
(irrespective of what kind of organization) views the plan as his.Good plans begin with the ‘goal’ of the
organization, and that goal comes from one person: the boss.

2) The first
details – the ‘guidance and intentions’ that spell out what the Boss really
wants and how he, in general terms, he wants to get it – are also creations of
the boss.

3) As the
planning process advances and the plan is developed, the Boss stays involved,
works with the planning team, and approves the plan at each major step.Good plans thus become completely
infused with ‘the Boss.’And that
means he has completely ‘bought in.’

4) Good bosses
know that the plan IS the future, and they put their best people on the
planning team.These people will
first plan the team and then assist in its implementation.No one knows the plan better then the
planning team, and no one will know better how to implement it then the
planning team.

5) Good
planning means that the planning team has spent considerable amounts of time
understanding the environment in which they function: the economy, the
technology, the law, the competition, the local and regional business climates,
etc., etc.They understand the
organization itself: its strengths and its weaknesses.They understand the trends, and they
also understand - at least as well as anyone else in the organization - various
indicators that something has changed.They will know when to execute the basic plan, and will also know when
the situation has changed and the plan no longer ‘fits.’

6) Good
planning also means that a wide range of options – courses of action – have
been considered before a final recommendation was made to the boss from which
to develop the strategy and implementation plan.Those options form the basis for variations on the plan,
what are called ‘branches and sequels.’Branch plans are variations of the plan that are designed to respond to
changes in the organization, the environments – particularly the competition –
or both.Sequels are follow-on
plans, plans for what happens if the first plan succeeds – based on the new
conditions, and plans for what happens if things don’t go quite as per the
plan, again with variations based on those new conditions.

The result is
that the value of a plan is as much – or more – in the process that produces
the plan as in the central plan itself.When done right the process produces not simply the plan but a small
core of people who are fully informed as to the goals and motives of the boss,
his boundaries – what he will and won’t do, what he will and won’t consider for
further action, a detailed knowledge of the organization and its capabilities
and limitations, a detailed knowledge of the ‘world’ in which they are
operating – competition, laws, technology, etc., and a ready ‘playbook’ of
actions that have been looked at, in some cases studied in great detail,
perhaps even ‘gamed,’ and a knowledge of what might and might not work in given
situations.

Plans come and
go; every good leader and every good organization not only has decent plans,
they know when to modify the plan, and when to flex to a branch plan, and when
to move to a sequel, and when to move into a new plan development cycle.Good plans and good leaders don’t fall
in love with their plans; they stick to their goals and use the plans and the
planning process to achieve them.

The lesson here
is summed up best by President Eisenhower, who had helped to craft a wide range
of US military plans throughout the 1930s and throughout World War II: ‘the
Plan is nothing, but the Planning is everything.’

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Nelson Mandela RIP

Nelson Mandela
died the other day, may he rest in peace.

There are a
great many people who will right much better eulogies of his life and
accomplishment then I am able, so I will only add a few thoughts on some of the
leadership lessons Mandela taught – and can still teach through the history of
his life and struggle, and they are applicable in virtually any situation,
especially any leadership position.

There are many
lessons we can draw from his life, but I’m going to focus on just 4:

Don’t let power
corrupt you.This is one that the
vast majority of people fail to understand.As Lord Acton noted more than a century ago: ‘Power corrupts
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Mandela could
have had absolute power, he could easily have held onto the Presidency of South
Africa as long as he wanted.But,
as with a few other leaders before him, he drew a lesson from history, walked
away, and set a precedent for the peaceful and regular transfer of power.

This is so much
more difficult to do – in any setting – than is commonly appreciated.The temptation is always present to
hold on, and the justification is that ‘I am needed, they [whoever ‘they’ are]
can’t survive without me.]Whether
we are leading a Scout troop, a small business, a large business or a
government, it is easy to convince ourselves of how crucial ‘we’ are.But good leadership is about making
yourself ‘dispensable,’ about leading people to focus on the long-term goals,
to train others to handle the problems, to lead – and to delegate, and to
remove ourselves from the solution.In the end good leaders make themselves unnecessary, and then freely
cede power and position.

Focus on the
big thing.Mandela focused on the
big thing: on freedom and equality and a better government.He made the idea of equality and
representative government the issue, not the past, not injuries already
suffered, but the new country, the future, the Constitution.Achieving your goals is difficult under
the best of conditions; achieving them while letting your focus wander is
impossible.The leader has to stay
focused, and he has to keep everyone else focused.It is always a demanding task, and he performed it very well
indeed.

Don’t hold a
grudge.This is the other side of
the coin to maintaining focus.It
is very easy – far too easy – to turn any situation into a matter of feeling as
if you are owed something for the past.Even if you are, the truth is you will never get anywhere if that is
your focus.If you expect both
restitution for previous grievances AND you expect to achieve something
worthwhile, you are living in a dreamland.No one has the energy and the necessary life-span to do
both. You cannot look forward and backward at the same time, and holding a
grudge is all about looking backward.

Smile. The
simple truth is that no one can long endure working for any goal if they aren’t
in some sense happy.And that
begins with the Boss.If you show
up at work, no matter what work is, and the Boss is always upset and angry and
unhappy, in the end you will be too, and all of you will find it that much more
difficult to reach your goals.

On the other
hand, even under the worst of circumstances great leaders find ways to get
folks to smile; it may be a grim smile, it may even be gallows humor, but they
will find a way to get folks to smile.Even in the worst of times, the pictures of Mandela showed his
captivating smile.Like Churchill
in bombed out sections of London flashing his ‘V for Victory’ sign and his
determined smile, there is more to be gained by a smile then a grimace.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Experience: How Much is Enough?

There are all
sorts of adages about experience and they are particularly common when we talk
about leadership and management.But the truth is that the basic fact of experience is often ignored when
it comes to selecting very senior leaders for organizations of any size, to
include our within government.Thus we elect people with no substantive leadership experience to be
governors (or presidents) and we feel nothing terribly wrong with appointing
people with no leadership experience to head huge departments of the
government.

There is an
obvious problem with a demand for too much experience; you can draw up a dream
resume (I see them all the time) that is so extensive anyone who had actually
achieved all the ‘required’ elements would need to be 150 years old.(I saw one recently – from a Defense
Contractor – who was looking for a recently retired Army or Marine Colonel with
combat experience as a brigade / regimental commander, a master’s degree,
fluency in a second language and extensive experience on procurement of a major
program, with Joint Staff experience.When you looked at the details it was literally impossible to have done
all that they wanted.)

And other jobs
obviously can’t be perfectly duplicated: you can’t be the governor of a state
before you are governor of a state, ergo, you never did ‘that job’ before.

Which leads to
a simple question: what is ‘enough’ experience to lead a huge corporation or a
state (or the country)?

First, a
warning: everyone has limits.Very
often, more often then we like, someone who did well at one level of leadership
fails at the next.While often
passed over as simply the ‘Peter Principle’ (though real enough), the real
issue is that people do have limits.The man who is competent running an organization of 100 people sometimes
fails – and fails dramatically - when running one of 1,000.

(The converse
is rarely true: someone is a poor leader in smaller organizations but succeeds
in larger one; there are a few examples, but they are rare and always have some
strange explanation.)

Two points come
to mind: you need several leadership positions before you reach a certain sized
organization; and you need to have had time to think.Let me explain.

You need to
begin with smaller organizations, one that lets you learn the fundamental
dynamics of leadership, how people work, how to communicate, how convince
people and build followers.This
is as true of absolute dictators as it is true of the manager of a corner drug
store: there is a real need for real followers, people who believe in
supporting you – for whatever reason.

A small
organization, perhaps less than a dozen, certainly less 40 is needed for a
start.An organization of such a
size lets you learn ‘up close and personal’ how people relate to each other, to
an organization, and to their assigned tasks.And in very real sense – as I will explain in a second – you
can experience every possible leadership challenge in a small organization; the
differences between a small and large organization can be in many cases only
one of numbers, not the real leadership issues.

(That military
platoons are no larger than 45 men is a demonstration of this point,
particularly when we remember that the leadership of a platoon really rests in
the hands of the platoon sergeant; that is why the platoon sergeant is there:
to lead the platoon and to teach the brand new officer with the titular
leadership role.It is, in fact,
and ideal structure to learn how to lead.)

Once you have
had some experience leading a small organization you need some time to sit and
think about what you have learned – a rotational schedule of 2 years in
leadership and a year out is probably best. Under ideal circumstances you would
have one or two small organizations, and one or two medium organizations (100
to 200 people in size) before you end up with an organization of roughly 500.

The 500 man
organization (and the number can fluctuate up and down a bit – the more
structured, the larger) is a key experience, as it is the last organization
that anyone can actually lead and feel and see and know the whole
organization.What everyone finds
is that it is at this sized and organization that they have the most rewarding
leadership experience.Having led
several organizations of this size, and several larger than this, the key is
the realization that with a 500 man organization you are right on the edge
having a personal contact throughout the organization.

Every leader or
manager when he first takes over such an organization will feel that it is
perhaps just a bit too large to control.As they gain some experience they will learn at first to control it, and
later find that the level of interaction and response from such an organization
is almost the perfect fit, just the right size to both ‘be in charge’ and have
enough size that the organization can accomplish significant things.

Then you get
moved up the ladder and you find yourself in charge of 1,000 or more
people.And suddenly everything
has changed.

The truth is
that this is the break point.Somewhere
between 500 and 1000 people it become truly too large to control.If you are smart and capable you
realize this quickly and count on your staff and your deputies – the folks who
are in charge of those departments underneath you that have anywhere from 100
folks to 500 folks.If you aren’t
smart you try to run 1000 people the same way you ran 500 – and you will
eventually learn that you can’t.

This is the key
leadership lesson: once you reach 1000 people you find you are back to leading
that team of 20 or 30 or 40.You
have your key staff, and you have your key deputies – the leaders of the
smaller units.They become the
people you actually lead.You must
lead them, train them to manage and train them to build followers, and give
them the ‘tools’ and resources so that they can do their jobs.

(Again, in the
military a battalion – anywhere from 450 to 650 men – is the largest medium
sized commands, and commanders are still in the field with the troops.The next command echelon, known as a
‘major command,’ is a brigade (or regiment in the Marines) and is one that is
commanded by a colonel and a staff and the ‘hands-on leadership’ is with the 3
– 5 battalions found within each brigade.)

This leadership
lesson is the key one to transition between running a small and medium sized
organization and a large one.Once
you have learned the lesson you can arguably run an organization of 10,000 or
100,000 or 1,000,000, because the real lesson is the same: you are no longer in
direct control, you have staffs and deputies and others who are real, regular,
daily contact with the people who do the real work.It is a simple lesson to learn in one sense: you can learn
it the first time you are “in charge” of a large organization and realize that
the folks doing the work have no real idea who you are or what you really
want.

The truth is
that the majority of senior leaders never learn the lesson.Most – the vast majority – of the
leaders of large organizations (and the military is as guilty as anyone else)
either end up trying to run the organization as if it had only 100 people all
located under one roof, or they try to run it as if it were nothing more than a
large-scale accounting problem, just a bunch of numbers that can be moved
around.Neither works.In most large and well funded
organizations there is enough management ‘padding’ that senior leaders can
focus on stock prices and quarterly returns and technology and their lack of
leadership skills are ignored until a problem develops and then they are promoted
to the board and someone else is brought in.This can go on for quite some time with institutional
inertia preventing collapse.In
the end real leadership is needed to save the organization (if it private), but
the truth is most private organizations don’t last that long.(The number I have heard quoted is that
the average $1 billion business lasts 12 years before being bought up by
someone else.)So, they can
develop a good idea or business model, grow too large for the ability of their
leadership, stumble along for a decade or so, and then be bought up.

This is equally
true in government, where we routinely see large departments in state and
federal government headed by someone who was a senior staffer or elected
official for decades and who has no leadership experience of a large
organization.So, they come in,
run the department for 2 years, it stumbles along – often wasting a great deal
of money – and then the department head goes off to a new position (often to
head a large corporation) with a well credentialed but misleading resume.

But if you want
someone to take the organization into the future, to actually grow it and make
it thrive, you need real leadership.And that means the leadership needs real – meaningful – experience.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Peter Murphy

Thank you to
the Marine Corps.Last week (on
Saturday, 23 November) the Marines held a memorial service for a friend of
mine: Peter Murphy.Peter died
last week (on the 15th) after several years of sickness – he was a
good man, a good husband, a good father, a true friend and a real patriot.He will be missed.

I first met
Peter in the mid 80s, shortly after my brother and his wife moved into a
townhouse in Alexandria.The
Murphys lived a few doors down and I met them shortly on my first visit to
Washington that year (I think it was in the fall of 1985).After that I seemed to meet him every
time I came to Washington.I began
to make it a point that every time I was in the Pentagon I would go past his
office.Somehow it all seemed fine
to me, though as I look back, it probably wasn’t.

Peter Murphy
was appointed the legal counsel to the Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1984
(a position he held until he retired in 2004) – I was a lieutenant in the Navy
at the time.He was, I suppose,
the rough equivalent of a Vice Admiral, I was a (very) junior officer.Yet every time I swung by his office he
would stop what he was doing and spend time talking with me.I suspect I swung by his office several
dozen times over the course of the next 20 years, as well as meeting him
frequently at my brother’s house.The same stories were told by a host of figures: of a wise, kind and
good man who loved his country, his friends and the Marines.That he was an excellent counsel for
the Marines is demonstrated by this one simple fact: he was Counsel to six
different Commandants: Generals Kelly, Gray, Mundy, Krulak, Jones, and Hagee,
and provided key counsel and advice to literally every single Marine 3 and 4
star officer for more than two decades.If his advice was anything other than sterling it is doubtful that he
would have survived working for such a collection of demanding figures.

Peter Murphy
loved the Marines (I should note he also served in the Army in the 1960s), and
one of my favorite stories is of a meeting of admirals and generals in the late
80s or early 90s during which the subject was the implementation of the
management theory ‘Total Quality Management’ – though changed within the Navy
Department to ‘Total Quality Leadership.’There was a good deal of contention as to how it would be implemented,
and what it would mean for the Marines.As might be expected, there were some strong opinions from some Marines
that this theory, which worked very well in some settings, perhaps wasn’t the
right fit for the Marines, with a 200 year legacy of small unit leadership and
adaptation in combat.Peter said
nothing until finally they were ‘going around the room’ asking if anyone had
anything else to add.And Peter
said:

Well, the
Marines were here for 200 years before TQL and I suspect that in 200 years the
Marines will still be here.”The
Marines in ‘the back of the room’ began to hoot and bark as only Marines
can.The meeting was over.

Peter Murphy is
a superb example of what everyone should want in a counselor: extreme
professional competence, brains, unflappable demeanor, a true care for the
organization and for those around him, and the willingness to always tell the
truth.It is an example we should
all follow.

He was a good
man and a true friend, and I will miss him.May he Rest In Peace.

About Me

I am a Navy veteran, founder of a small business, and a concerned American who believes that informed debate is the cornerstone to solving our problems.
I have nearly three decades of experience in leading, managing and planning coupled with degrees in business management, space systems and international security studies.